This week's post is brought to you by the letter B

...for backwards.

I've written before how much I think modern education policy is going in the wrong direction. This post will be no exception. First, the Young Education Professionals' Blog has this great piece about the "3 blunders of Common Core" and solutions for each. While CCSS does have good ideas, its biggest blunder is that things happened much too quickly. As any policy-maker or scientist can tell you, slower changes for something as gigantic as the national education system, work better. It's easier to tell what works and what doesn't when there are fewer variables.

Valerie Strauss has also reported about two different issues that I would like to address: The first relates to the concept above, that change must happen slowly, and that it doesn't come out of nowhere. Finally, this other piece suggests that collaboration is at the core of strong policy, especially when it comes to the classroom, which I firmly believe. But when you have Race to the Top and similar initiatives, competition takes the place of collaboration. Though competition is not in and of itself a bad thing, education is not the place for it. When it comes to improving schools, things work much more smoothly if collaboration is firmly in place.

I'm not saying anything that has not been said before. But perhaps if these things keep getting said by parents, educators, students, and other people who are actually in the trenches of education, things will finally start getting better.